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An unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV), commonly known as a drone, is an aircraft without any human pilot, crew, or passengers on board. UAVs were originally developed through the twentieth century for military missions too "dull, dirty or dangerous" [1] for humans, and by the twenty-first, they had become essential assets to most militaries.
- List of Unmanned Aerial Vehicle Applications
IAI Heron, an unmanned surveillance and reconnaissance...
- General Atomics Mq-9 Reaper
The General Atomics MQ-9 Reaper (sometimes called Predator...
- Northrop Grumman Bat
The Northrop Grumman Bat is a medium-altitude unmanned air...
- DJI
History A DJI store in Shenzhen, Guangdong. The company was...
- Hermes-450
The Elbit Hermes 450 is an Israeli medium-sized...
- UAV (Disambiguation)
A UAV is an unmanned aerial vehicle, commonly known as a...
- Bayraktar Tb2
The Bayraktar TB2 is a medium-altitude long-endurance (MALE)...
- Hale (High Altitude, Long Endurance)
Mostly unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), they remain aloft...
- List of unmanned aerial vehicles
Teledyne Ryan BQM-145 Peregrine, reconnaissance (1992)...
- List of Unmanned Aerial Vehicle Applications
- Early Development
- World War II
- Cold War
- War on Terror
- See Also
- Further Reading
Austrian incendiary balloon attack on Venice
The earliest recorded use of an unmanned aerial vehicle for warfighting occurred in July 1849, serving as a balloon carrier (the precursor to the aircraft carrier) is the first offensive use of air power in naval aviation. Austrian forces besieging Venice attempted to float some 200 incendiary balloons each carrying a 24- to 30-pound bomb that was to be dropped from the balloon with a time fuse over the besieged city. The balloons were launched mainly from land; however, some were also launch...
World War I
The first pilotless aircraft were built during World War I. From a suggestion that A. M. Low’s expertise in early television and radio technology be used to develop a remotely controlled pilotless aircraft to attack the Zeppelins a remarkable succession of British drone weapons in 1917 and 1918 evolved. Designers from Sopwith Aviation and its contractor Rushton Proctor, de Havilland and the Royal Aircraft Factory all became involved. They were all designed to use Low's radio control system de...
Interwar period
After World War I, three Standard E-1s were converted to drones. The Larynx was an early cruise missile in the form of a small monoplane aircraft that could be launched from a warship and flown under autopilot; the Royal Navy tested it between 1927 and 1929. The early successes of pilotless aircraft led to the development of radio controlled pilotless target-aircraft in Britain and the US in the 1930s. In 1931 the British developed the Fairey Queen radio-controlled target from the Fairey IIIF...
Reginald Denny and the Radioplane
The first large-scale production, purpose-built drone was the product of Reginald Denny. He served with the British Royal Flying Corps during World War I, and after the war, in 1919, he returned to the United States to resume his career in Hollywood. Denny was a successful leading man and between acting jobs, he pursued his interest in radio controlmodel aircraft in the 1930s opening a shop. The shop evolved into the "Radioplane Company". Denny believed that low-cost RC aircraft would be very...
Aerial torpedoes
The US Navy began experimenting with radio-controlled aircraft during the 1930s as well, resulting in the Curtiss N2C-2drone in 1937. The N2C-2 was remotely controlled from another aircraft, called a TG-2. N2C-2 anti-aircraft target drones were in service by 1938. The US Army Air Forces (USAAF) adopted the N2C-2 concept in 1939. Obsolescent aircraft were put into service as "A-series" anti-aircraft target drones. Since the "A" code would be also used for "Attack" aircraft, later "full-sized"...
Pulsejets
The V-1 flying bomb was the first cruise missile ever built. It was built in the Peenemünde Army Research Centerand first tested in 1942. The V-1 was intended to target London and was massively fired, achieving more than one hundred launches a day. The V-1 was launched from a rail system to achieve the speed needed to operate its pulsejet engine and would achieve a 250 kilometers radius, at one point flying at 640 km/h. McDonnell built a pulsejet-powered target, the TD2D-1 Katydid, later the...
Target drone evolution
In the post-World War II period, Radioplane followed up the success of the OQ-2 target drone with another very successful series of piston-powered target drones, what would become known as the Basic Training Target (BTT) family (the BTT designation wasn't created until the 1980s, but is used here as a convenient way to resolve the tangle of designations), including the OQ-19/KD2R Quail and the MQM-33/MQM-36 Shelduck. The BTTs remained in service for the rest of the 20th century. The first tar...
Nuclear tests
In 1946, eight B-17 Flying Fortresses were transformed by American airmen into drones for collecting radioactive data. They were controlled at takeoff and landing from a transmitter on a jeep, and during flight by a transmitter on another B-17. They were used on Bikini Atoll (Operation Crossroads) to gather samples from inside the radioactive cloud. During test Baker, two drones were flown directly above the explosion; when the shock wave reached them, both gained height, and the lowest was d...
Reconnaissance platforms
In the late 1950s, along with the Falconer, the US Army acquired another reconnaissance drone, the Aerojet-General SD-2 Overseer. It had a similar configuration to the Falconer, but featured a vee tail and was about twice as heavy.[citation needed] The success of drones as targets led to their use for other missions. The well-proven Ryan Firebee was a good platform for such experiments, and tests to evaluate it for the reconnaissance mission proved highly successful. A series of reconnaissanc...
The use of armed drones came into its own with the start of the War on Terror. The global audience was exposed to armed drones and their lethal uses when after the September 11, 2001 attacks an American UAV killed Qaed Salim Sinan al-Harethi (aka Abu Ali al-Harithi) in a November 2002 drone strike that killed six people, including Qaed, the alleged...
Axe, David. Drone War Vietnam.Pen & Sword, Military, Great Britain. 2021. ISBN 978 1 52677 026 4Fahrney, Delmer S. (RAdm ret): History of Radio-Controlled Aircraft and Guided MissilesHobson, Chris. Vietnam Air Losses, United States Air Force, Navy and Marine Corps Fixed-Wing Aircraft Losses in Southeast Asia 1961-1973. 2001, Midland Publishing, UK. ISBN 1-85780-115-6.McDaid, Hugh & Oliver, David.: Robot Warriors. The Top Secret History of the Pilotless Plane. Orion Media, 1997.A group photo of aerial demonstrators at the 2005 Naval Unmanned Aerial Vehicle Air Demo. An unmanned aerial vehicle, often called a drone, is an aircraft that is not operated by a pilot on board. Drones may have an onboard computer to take care of adjustments to wind and changes in air pressure. Sometimes they are programmed to a particular ...
2 days ago · General Atomics MQ-1 Predator, a reconnaissance unmanned aerial vehicle of the U.S. Air Force, 2006. UAVs are descended from target drones and remotely piloted vehicles (RPVs) employed by the military forces of many countries in the decades immediately after World War II. Modern UAVs debuted as an important weapons system in the early 1980s ...
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A British MQ-9A Reaper operating over Afghanistan in 2009. An unmanned combat aerial vehicle (UCAV), also known as a combat drone, fighter drone or battlefield UAV, is an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) that is used for intelligence, surveillance, target acquisition, and reconnaissance and carries aircraft ordnance such as missiles, anti-tank guided missiles (ATGMs), and/or bombs in hardpoints ...
M. Unmanned aerial vehicle manufacturers (11 C, 40 P) Micro air vehicles (16 P) Unmanned military aircraft (7 C, 14 P)
